Read on to learn about Adonthell's origins and the different milestones.

The Adonthell project as it exists now was started in summer 1999 by Alexandre Courbot, James Nash and Kai Sterker. It has its offspring in two distinct projects that were combined after both applied for webspace here at Linux Games.

Initially, Alex was working on a Final Fantasy style game, concentrating on a tile based graphics engine named Genescroll. The remains of that period, like the "famous" Island level were never released to the public, though.

The Island	under water

At the same time, about 800km away, Kai was planning a game in the tradition of Ultima VII, concentrating on an interesting plot and the underlying game world. Obviously, the two projects were complementing each other, and so Adonthell was born.

The first release, v0.1, was based on an improved Genescroll engine, with the nice graphics of James, who had met Alex on a holiday in France. A few months later, v0.2 appeared, with completely rewritten code and the music of Joseph Toscano. Like the first release it contained no trace of gameplay however.

The Forest Inn	A Witch's house

It took 18 months and several complete code rewrites to get v0.3 done. As a result, it had a much improved graphics engine, a flexible GUI system written by Joel Vennin and support for scripting in Python.

Thanks to all that, the Waste's Edge demo had actual gameplay, centered around a locked room mystery with over 1000 lines of dialogue written by Mike Nieforth, Josh Glover and Kai. James and Benjamin Walter-Franks provided the picturesque graphics and character animations.

Redwyne Inn kitchen	Oliver Redwyne

After the release of Waste's Edge in January 2002, we concentrated on improving the code base and porting it to different platforms, including Sun Solaris and, recently, the Sharp Zaurus. Windows and MacOS X ports are also in the making.

At the same time, work on v0.4 and the new Dun Barethsol demo game has started, which features yet another incarnation of the mapengine and many other improvements and additions over the previous release.

To be continued ...

pagedesign: © Copyright 2007 The Adonthell Team / Benjamin Walther-Franks
contents: © Copyright 2007 The Adonthell Team / Kai Sterker
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